


Weren't You Adored

by GingerAlchemy



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/F, F/M, Fluff, Missing Scenes, POV Outsider, Post-Movie: The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998), Requited Love, Season/Series 06, Unrequited Love, dana scully gets kissed, everyone has a crush on Dana Scully
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2021-01-16 18:40:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21275873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GingerAlchemy/pseuds/GingerAlchemy
Summary: Holly is in love with Dana Scully. But then again, who isn't?





	Weren't You Adored

**Author's Note:**

> Hmmm okay, so it turns out that writing X Files fic has been the only way to keep my sanity this semester. This is a little fic about Holly, Skinner’s secretary, who was in one episode, but I thought she was really cute. Agent Scully may not want to go out with Holly (there's some pretty stiff competition), but I would.

"He's never going to love you," Laura says. Laura is leaning over Holly's desk smoking a cigarette that isn't allowed inside--at least, not when it's a stray secretary smoking it. She's draped all over the back of Holly's chair. They're watching agents Mulder and Scully disappear from view down the long hallway outside Skinner's office. Well, Laura is watching Mulder and Scully. Holly is mostly watching Scully.  
"Hmmm?"  
"Agent Mulder. You're staring after him like a lovesick puppy and I'm telling you, it's not going to happen. " Laura leans down closer to Holly's ear but when she whispers, it's loud enough that she might as well have said it out loud. "They're doing it."  
Holly turns to glare at Laura. She's aware that when she glares at people, they usually find it endearing rather than frightening. She has a baby face. Oh, how she hates her baby face. Some women walk through the world with heads held high, perfect sharp cheekbones and cool eyes you could drown in. Holly walks through the world with her baby fat and her thrift store heels, trying not to trip.  
"Who told you that? I bet it was Marcy from accounting, wasn't it? You know she lies for attention."  
"Nope." Laura pops the p. Breaths out smoke that curls around Holly's left ear until Holly swats at her. She laughs. "You aren't curious?"  
Holly is desperately curious. "No," she lies.  
Laura laughs again. "Knew it. It was Eve--you know, works in fingerprinting? Anyway she said they're definitely fucking."  
"They are not!"  
"Oh, come on. It's obvious. We've all heard. She nearly quit when they told her she couldn't work with him."  
"That doesn't mean anything. Agent Scully is a professional. I'm sure she had her reasons."  
Laura pokes her in the side, and Holly batts at her finger absentmindedly. She thinks of Agent Scully's calm voice and her steady hands and the small vacant smile she gave Holly on the elevator just this morning. It's Holly's goal to prompt a real smile someday, and this afternoon, she spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking of jokes while Skinner's meeting dragged on and on.  
"I like a few of my coworkers," Laura said. She paused, poked Holly in the side again until Holly really looked at her. "But I wouldn't quit just because I couldn't be with them on the job."  
"No, you'd quit a few weeks afterwards when you realized I wasn't there to carry around extra lighters and peppermints."  
Laura threw her head back and laughed. Laughs were always an event with Laura. Holly didn't know where you got that kind of dedication to the moment but sometimes she admired it from the distance of her own desktop. Laura was the heroine of an 80's movie. But in real life, she was a secretary for everyone's boss, Assistant Director Kersh.  
"No I wouldn't. Anyway, you'd never quit. You have it too bad for Agent Mulder. God, his new haircut is awful."  
"Is it? I hadn't noticed." Holly drums her fingers against the polished wood of her desk. She's had her nails done in perfect little pink ovals like the rest of the women in the building. Never hurts to make an effort to belong. "You really think they're together?"  
Laura looks at her sharply. She's migrated from the back of Holly's chair to the side of the desk facing her. Her butt squashes several fairly important folders Holly had been organizing earlier, before Scully had asked for a favor and she'd forgotten about them.  
"Yeah. He looks at her the way I look at the bacon egg breakfast burrito downstairs. I need that to _survive_."  
"Oh," Holly says.  
"Yeah," Laura says. She extinguishes her cigarette on top of the little yellow notepad Holly keeps next to her coffee mug. The mug was a Christmas present from Assistant Director Skinner. It has bright little flowers all over it. She's very fond of it—see, Holly Barclay is well liked by her coworkers (even after the Modell incident). See, Holly Barclay is good at her job.  
"Well, I'm out. Break time's over. Say, Holly, some of the girls and I are going out tonight, probably to that new bar on Eighth and Rollingwood. Wanna come?"  
“Oh,” Holly says again. She’s never been good at turning down invitations, especially when her only excuse is that she hasn’t done the laundry. To be fair, getting her clothes down to the communal laundry room at her apartment complex, waiting for a free washer, and then trying to find extra change in her purse and her car does usually occupy a good few hours of the night.  
Laura winks at her, all perfect red lipstick and raised eyebrow, bangs fluffed up on top of her head. The 80s have called, but Laura, brave as ever, has refused to pick up the phone.  
“Okay, maybe next time then.”  
She pats Holly on the shoulder as she leaves. Her heels make solid little clicks on the floor, gunfire from a distance.  
Holly tries to decide what color blouse to wear in the morning.

She’s in the elevator sipping the coffee which she’d splurged on this morning—some mornings just call for the mocha latte from the coffee shop three blocks down—when the doors open and Agent Scully steps in. As always, she looks preoccupied. Her fingers tap a restless rhythm on the wristwatch on her other hand, but her face is as lovely and composed as ever. Holly watches the light hit her hair for a good few seconds, trying to understand how she looks this beautiful under florescents.  
“Good morning, Agent Scully,” she manages.  
Scully turns, as though just noticing she’s not alone. Her face warms by a few degrees, but it’s a practiced few. Holly tries not to mind.  
“Oh hi, Holly.”  
A tiny surge of warmth spreads through Holly’s chest at Scully’s use of her name. It shouldn’t make her this happy, but she knows thanks to Steve from the lab that Scully once forgot a man’s name mid-meeting, called him Jeff instead of Bobby.  
“Busy morning planned?”  
Scully eyes her. Not suspiciously, she doesn’t think. But Scully would know that Holly knows she’s not working the X Files anymore. Holly curses inside her own head. Of course the question sounded gloating, nosy. Why does she always pick the worst conversation openers?  
As though witnessing the outward signs of Holly’s internal panic, Scully’s eyebrows drop. She smiles slightly.  
“No, actually. We’re investigating, uh. Possible signs of domestic terrorism.”  
“That’s your slow morning, wow.”  
Holly is aware of the stars in her own eyes.  
“Well, most of them turn out to be nothing.” Scully sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Much like many other situations in life.”  
She realizes that Holly’s staring at her and smiles again, this time with a little more of her face.  
“Sorry, Holly. Didn’t mean to complain at you. It’s been a long few weeks.”  
“I’ll bet,” Holly’s traitorous, curious mouth says before her brain can catch up. She’s heard stories of medical leave and rented snow rovers.  
She opens her mouth to clarify, to say something less awkward, but then the elevator doors open again and Scully’s face immediately relaxes while her lips turn up at the corners. Holly peers outside to see that Agent Mulder is waiting in the hall with two coffees—and indeed, a bad haircut. It looks like it’s been chopped up by tiny Bureau helicopters.  
And the way Scully presses forward towards him, immediately discarding the conversation, like she’s remembered something important, makes Holly’s stomach twist.  
“There you are,” Mulder says. His smile is too soft and genuine for a Monday morning at 8 AM. “Thought you’d run off to Antarctica again.”  
Antarctica?  
Holly can only see the back of Scully’s head, but she watches the slant of her shoulders. Downwards, relaxed. Like she’s safe with Mulder and his awful hair. Her whole body angles towards him. Holly once read that if your feet point straight forward towards someone, that means that you’re interested in them and only them.  
The doors slide shut again, and Holly forlornly sips at the coffee which she bought for herself. Antarctica. She thinks of snow drifts tall as her head and wonders, if she ran off to Antarctica, would anyone follow? Maybe her cat, Jimkirk. Jimkirk would miss her.  
There’s not even anything that special about Agent Mulder. Holly can only sort of judge good looks in men, but she’s heard enough office talk that she knows he’s handsome. She’s also heard the talk that he’s obsessive, that in 1990, he dated half the single women in the building and then ditched them one by one to work on cases that became more and more bizarre over the years. That he ditches Scully too, and then she tears the whole Bureau apart to find him, that the expense reports are terrifying. That he hasn’t had anything serious since 1992.  
As dry spells go, that would be a long one. Although Holly can’t say her love life has improved since joining the Bureau, she thinks glumly that Laura is probably right and he’s been in love with Scully that whole time. Who hasn’t?  
She thinks of Scully’s perfect hair and the curious tilt of her head, her low soft voice. She sighs. It’s a lost cause.

They’re sitting in a booth at the bar. Laura’s voice carries over the voices of the others—they’re loud, but she’s louder. Sitting pressed up against Laura’s side is like sitting next to a boombox, but Holly’s not complaining. If Laura does all the talking, then Holly can just sit here getting pleasantly buzzed off her apple flavored cider.  
The bar is warm, and Laura’s launched into a story about her brother’s dog. The girls surrounding her—Eleanor, Eve, and a couple of giggly women from accounting—try and interrupt with stories of their own dogs or of their recent bad dates. Holly is very content not to join in this conversation.  
But of course, Laura sloppily elbows her at that very moment. She gets touchy when she drinks, constantly in Holly’s space even more than usual.  
“Hey, you know who Holly here wants to go out with?”  
Holly takes a long gulp of her cider in preparation for the next words that come out of Laura’s mouth.  
“Nobody,” she insists.  
“Mulder,” Laura says triumphantly. “That’s right, our girl is walking the same perilous path as every other Bureau secretary in 1991.”  
“I do not have a thing for Agent Mulder!” Holly can feel her face flushing.  
“Ooh,” Eleanor says. Eleanor is a tall woman with smooth dark hair and heavy, carefully shaped eyebrows. Three drinks in, her lipstick shows not a smudge. “Honey, I tried, and he said no. And if he said no to me, then he must be taken.”  
Hoots of laughter ring out around the table. Eve gets up to get another drink.  
“Who wants shots?” she calls.  
Laura raises her hand immediately, and Holly pulls it back down. Laura does not need another shot. Laughing, Laura tilts her head back onto Holly’s shoulder. Her perfume smells like vanilla.  
“She’s trying to punish me! She doesn’t want anyone to know about her unrequited love. But Holly,” she turns into Holly’s neck and lets out a breath there that makes Holly’s spine tingle just a little bit. God, this is why Holly doesn’t go out. “You can’t hide the truth.”  
“I’m not hiding anything,” Holly lies, with the long-practiced efficiency of this particular lie—the only one she’s ever really gotten any good at. “You’re smudging me.”  
Laura looks down to see that she’s left a trail of bright red lipstick on the shoulder of Holly’s white blouse.  
“Shit, I am.” But she doesn’t sound apologetic. “I’ll make it up to you.” Her voice is low and secretive. Holly shivers involuntarily.  
“God, she is drunk,” Eleanor observes.  
“It’s okay,” Holly says. “I’ll call a cab for her in a little while.”  
“Don’t want a cab. I want you to drive me home. You’re the only one I trust to find the place.” Laura’s stage whisper is very dramatic. Her head lolls back against the booth wall.  
Holly pats her hair, which has been fluffed up to previously unheard-of heights. “We’ll get you some water too.”  
Twenty minutes later, after Holly’s forced a glass of water into Laura and listened to Eve complain about her boyfriend’s bad hygiene, she makes their excuses, pulls on Laura’s hand, and steers them towards the bar to pay for their tabs.  
It’s that moment when she sees them. Agents Mulder and Scully, trench coats and all, huddled up against the bar. Scully perches on a stool, and Mulder performs an interesting balance act that looks a little bit like sitting on his own stool and a little bit like surrounding hers. His legs bracket her stool, anyway, shielding her from anyone else’s attention. Their arms press together; their faces hover close enough to kiss or exchange secrets. They look like they blew in from a different world, a world in which they are the only two inhabitants.  
Scully’s hands cradle a beer, but she’s not really paying it much attention. The beer is an excuse for this moment—the perfect insularity of their conversation, her eyes drifting down to his lips and then back up again, roving his face like it contains everything she’s ever wanted to know.  
Holly would be afraid that Agent Scully will notice her, but Agent Scully is clearly dead to the rest of the universe. Something raw and aching pushes up against the back of Holly’s throat when she looks at them. Because she doesn’t know a lot about love, but she knows about captivation, and she sees it in the wide sky blue of Scully’s eyes.  
And when Holly tries to imagine what it would feel like to have someone’s eyes turned on her that way, she comes up with a blank.  
“Hey, what are you doing? He’s asking for your card.” Laura pokes her insistently.  
Holly shakes her head, apologizes to the bartender, and hands him her credit card.  
Then they stumble out of the bar together, Laura pressing into her for warmth.  
“If you’d brought a jacket,” Holly starts. Around them, stray crows dig through the trash and neon signs flash in the distance.  
“Well, I didn’t.”  
Holly takes off her own jacket and offers half its warmth to Laura, who has to lean down to pull it up over her shoulder. She shivers against Holly’s bare arm, sending goosebumps all the way down.  
“Thanks, love.” Laura can get away with pet names. She’s one of those women. Tall and confident women who can say anything, just anything, and it turns out fine.  
“What was that about in the bar just now?” she asks.  
Holly shrugs. “Oh, nothing. I thought I saw someone I recognized.”  
She can feel Laura’s gaze on her, and in fact she can feel Laura’s hair swish against her cheek as they make their slow way down the street towards Holly’s car.  
“Anyone important?”  
“No.”  
“An ex?”  
“No, Laura! Why are you so interested in my love life?”  
Laura doesn’t respond for a moment, and then she sighs. Holly expects her to make a joke, but when she speaks, her voice is only a little wry. “I guess because I have to assume it’s more interesting than mine.”  
“You don’t have to make me feel better.”  
“I’m not. It’s just. It’s hard sometimes, being as hot as this—”  
“Oh, I’ll bet,” Holly interjects. She pokes Laura’s ribcage through the layers of her sheer blue blouse.  
“Hey! What I mean is, it’s not like I never get any offers.”  
“When you said you weren’t trying to make me feel better, you really meant it, huh?”  
Laura has to pause for a moment to laugh. She buries her face in Holly’s shoulder again, trying to stop, but her shoulders still shake. Holly thinks it has a lot to do with the rum. “Shut up, shut up, I’m trying to tell you something,” Laura insists. She pulls her head up to look Holly more or less in the eye. Now they’ve reached Holly’s car, and they’re leaning against it while Holly fishes for her keys inside her purse. It’s hard to fish for keys while Laura’s staring at her like that.  
“Tell me something then.”  
“I get offers,” Laura says. She bites her bottom lip, leaves tooth marks against it that fascinate Holly. “They’re just not from the demographic I’d prefer.”  
“The demographic?” Holly’s face flushes as she tries to decide if Laura means what she thinks. She swallows.  
“Oh, for God’s sake,” says Laura. She untangles herself from the side of Holly’s coat she’d been using and immediately starts to shiver. Her arms wrap around the front of her own body protectively. “I mean that I go out with girls.”  
And the way Laura’s looking at her makes Holly’s chest hurt again, because she knows the look, she knows the fear that’s slowly rising in Laura’s eyes the longer no one says anything.  
Holly clears her throat. “Can I tell you a secret too?”  
“Yeah,” Laura says. Her voice comes out hoarse.  
“It isn’t Agent Mulder I have a thing for.”  
Laura’s face twists up in confusion, passes through realization, then lands on delight. She tosses her head back and laughs.  
“Holly! You wanna do it with Scully?”  
“And I don’t have a chance in the world,” Holly says. But she’s grinning too.  
“Fuck, if I’d known that was your type…You like them ice cold, huh?”  
“She is not ice cold! She smiled at me this afternoon!”  
“It was an icy smile.”  
“It wasn’t.”  
“Yeah it was. Like this,” and Laura does her best Agent Scully. Cocks her hip and tilts her head to the side, rolls her eyes, then gives Holly a smile that looks more like a gargoyle’s grimace.  
Holly has to lean her full weight against the car, she’s laughing so hard.  
“It wasn’t like that!”  
Laura points to her face, grimaces wider, and Holly shoves her arm, which sends Laura tottering back on her heels.  
“Ouch, Holly! Open the car door before I mug you for your coat.”  
So Holly unlocks the car and they stumble in, still laughing. The drive back home is warmer than it’s ever been.

She should have known it would happen eventually. It’s the beginning of what will no doubt be a long day—Skinner’s got meetings from 8 AM to 8 PM, and Holly has to take notes on most of them in the absence of the usual note taker. She still feels a little out of sorts from staying up late to catch the Star Trek marathon on TV last night.  
So when she steps on board the elevator, she doesn’t notice she’s punched in the wrong floor until the door opens into the dimly-lit corridor of the lowest level, the one with the snack machines and the dusty floors.  
Abruptly, she realizes that she is not alone on the lowest level. Just to the side of the snack machines, hidden from the view of the security camera that points towards the elevator, Agent Scully is being kissed. It looks like a good kiss—Mulder’s fingers tangle in her hair, and she’s got her hands pressed against his chest like she thought about shoving him away and then gave in and bunched her fingers in his shirt. It’s a movie kiss, lit by the glow of the coke machine, perfect in its desperation.  
In the shock of this moment, Holly is sure that she’ll be able to sneak away. The scene will play on, and the elevator doors will close, and she’ll be able to escape to the women’s restroom and have some private conflicting feelings re: the perfect Agent Scully and her lover of choice.  
No such luck. The elevator doors make a whining noise. They’ve been doing that recently. They’ll try to close and then wait a minute, give some geriatric wheezing before they finally decide to obey commands.  
_ Ghosts in the system_, Laura told her. Laura is a firm believer in ghosts. Holly is a firm believer in elevator repair, and never more so than in the split second between when Mulder and Scully break apart, still a little dazed, and when they whirl around to face her.  
Holly wants to melt into the floor. She wants to find a crack, any crack, and slither through it. She wants to evaporate.  
She does none of those things. She stares, doe-eyed, in the face of the second most embarrassing thing that’s happened to her at the FBI. She raises her fingers and gives a small helpless wave.  
Scully’s fingers are still wrapped around Mulder’s tie, and it seems to take her a few seconds to remember to release him. Mulder winces, but he also kind of looks like he wants to laugh.  
“Just getting an iced coffee,” he calls out cheerfully. “Isn’t that right, Agent Scully?”  
Scully steps backward abruptly, and when her eyes lock on Holly’s, her cheeks have turned a color Holly’s never seen before. Mulder keeps glancing at her in open fascination. Holly is worried he might just ignore her and keep kissing Scully, but Scully clears her throat and straightens her suit jacket. Her face goes stony and official. This is the face she probably uses to read people their Miranda rights. Except bright red.  
She marches towards the elevator. “Come on, Mulder. The coffee’s better on the second floor.”  
Mute, he follows her. He’s biting his lip to hide a smile.  
The elevator ride is a silent one. By the time they finally reach the second floor, Holly thinks that she might actually be in purgatory—her old grumpy aunt must have been right about the afterlife. Although she admires Agent Scully’s determination to march into problems head-on, Holly deeply wishes that she hadn’t been caught in the crossfire.  
“Have a good day, Holly,” Mulder says blithely as they exit the elevator, his hand pressed to the small of Scully’s back. She reaches backwards to swat at it, although the swat is halfhearted, and then the doors close, leaving Holly alone.  
It strikes Holly on her way up to the third floor women’s restroom, that she’s now in sole possession of the motherlode of office gossip material. She could win the betting pool. Every betting pool—there are three. Holly thinks of Agent Scully’s fingers clinging to Mulder’s shirt like he might drift away. Like he might not want to be there. He’d have to be insane not to want to be there, but Scully doesn’t know that.  
Scully doesn’t know because she’s in the middle of it. It’s easy to interpret longing for almost anything else, if you never take it for granted.  
And then Holly realizes, there’s only one person in the world that she really wants to tell.  
When she finally reaches Skinner’s office, he calls for her through the door.  
“You’re late, Barclay.”  
“Sorry, sir,” she says absently. She doesn’t take a useful note all day.

“I’m going to tell you something,” Holly says. She’s gone all the way to Kersh’s office. It’s a Tuesday, and it’s her break, and Laura’s been conspicuously absent the past few days, so when Holly sees her sitting at her desk, smoking a banned cigarette and propping her feet up like an ad for everything in the world, an outsized relief floods her.  
“Damn, Holly. You look like you ran all the way up here.”  
Holly flushes. “I didn’t. Anyway, where have you been?”  
“Life’s busy, hon.” Laura blows a stream of smoke out through dark red lips.  
Holly can feel herself starting to scowl. She marches up to Laura’s desk, and props herself up in front of Laura so she has to pay attention. “Don’t give me that. What’s going on?”  
“Nothing’s going on.” Laura shrugs, but her eyes shift downwards. “Tell me what you’re going to tell me.”  
Holly taps her finger against Laura’s desk. Laura has moods sometimes. She’s like a movie heroine that way. Or a mid-spring breeze. Holly never realized how much she counted on that breeze sweeping through the office every day around 1, until it stopped sweeping through.  
“I can’t tell you here.”  
She reaches out to grab Laura’s hand, and reluctantly, Laura lets herself be dragged out the door, through the hallway, and into the elevator.  
She leans against the side of the elevator and lights another cigarette.  
“Where are we going?”  
“Here.” Holly bumps her hip against the stop button on the side of the door and pretends to be surprised when they screech to a halt. The elevator is taped, but there’s no sound. This will probably look like a technical failure on the tape, and then maybe they’ll finally fix the elevator.  
“Jesus, is it a national secret?”  
Laura doesn’t even look surprised, or she’s got the best poker face in the world. Holly knows something about poker faces.  
“Laura, I need your advice on something.”  
Laura taps the toe of one shoe against the toe of the other. “Okay, hit me.”  
“So I’ve realized that someone I used to have a crush on is definitely taken. I mean, without a doubt, she’s…spoken for.”  
Laura’s eyes widen ever so slightly. “What kind of proof…”  
“Get your mind out of the gutter, I caught them kissing.”  
“Okay….And?”  
Holly sighs in frustration. She steps over to Laura, reaches out, and takes the cigarette from her fingers. Experimentally, she takes a drag, coughing out smoke. This has done nothing to make the conversation easier, but at least Laura’s smiling—or trying not to. She keeps leaning against the wall, but her shoulders relax.  
“And, I don’t know how to feel about it.” Holly tries to take another drag; this one is a little easier, but she still doesn’t see the appeal. “I mean, I saw him kiss her, and on one hand, it sucked. But on the other hand…”  
“You could win the office betting pool?”  
Holly shakes her head. “I could. But it would feel wrong. Laura, I watched her looking at him, and it struck me that she could have done that years ago. And as long as I’ve known her, she’s been preoccupied with him. I’ve tried to pretend she wasn’t.”  
“I know.” Laura’s voice is wry, but she’s gone very very still. Her hand rests deliberately against her side, like she’s keeping it from reaching for the cigarette, reaching for anything.  
“I guess my question is, do you think it’s possible to be so focused on something that you forget why you wanted it in the first place?”  
“What does that have to do with Agent Scully?” Laura asks cautiously.  
“Nothing. It has nothing to do with her.”  
Laura’s eyes widen again. She casually steps away from the wall, into the middle of the floor where Holly’s standing. Now Holly can smell her perfume, and it’s lavender today. It makes her want to step closer.  
“You don’t have a crush on Agent Scully?” Laura asks.  
“I thought I did. But now I’m not so sure.”  
“Why not? She’s still fucking gorgeous.”  
Now Laura does take the cigarette. Her fingertips brush Holly’s, and then she’s dropping the cigarette on the floor in blatant violation of all litter policies and crushing it with the toe of her shoe.  
“I thought you said she was icy,” Holly protests.  
“I might have exaggerated a little bit.” Laura pauses, swallows. Holly can see her throat move above the starched white of her collar. “Why not?” she asks again more intently.  
“Because.” Holly takes a breath. “You know how Agent Scully spent years and years not kissing the guy she clearly wanted to kiss? She wasn’t paying enough attention. And I—” here she can’t look at Laura straight on. “I think that maybe I haven’t been paying enough attention either.”  
Laura stares at her for a long moment, and her expression is so frozen between terror and hope that Holly feels her own heart pounding in her chest to match it.  
Suddenly, Laura sweeps past her, mashes a button on the door console. Holly’s breaths are heavy in the air that’s becoming stale and humid the longer they stay closed up in it.  
“Laura, what are you—”  
“Not here,” Laura says. The elevator lurches into motion, and Holly’s stomach rises for a queasy moment as it shoots downwards. When it stops again, the doors open on the basement level, and Laura grabs her hand and pulls her out. She glances up towards the ceiling and then drags them both towards the coke machine.  
“Listen,” Laura says, and her voice is all rough with fear or want. It sends a thrill of danger down Holly’s spine. They’re standing very close together, and in the red glow of the light from the machine, Laura’s hair glints like gold. “Listen, if I’m misreading you, you have to tell me now. I can’t—if you’re not saying what I think you’re saying then—”  
And Laura’s the certain one, the movie star, the nonchalant observer of the world, so if her hands are shaking, then Holly’s knees might as well be jelly. But six inches away, Laura’s mouth is red and perfect, and it comes to Holly in a rush, how much she’s always, always wondered what would happen if she pressed her own lips right there.  
Holly makes up her mind. She steps forward and kisses Laura.  
Laura makes a little noise of surprise but then she’s melting into it, dragging her palms down Holly’s back, pulling her in closer. Holly reaches up to tangle her fingers in Laura’s hair—finally, finally, some part of her mind supplies—and the whole world is made up of Laura’s warm mouth and firm hands. She tastes like lipstick and drug store candy. Holly sighs into her lips.  
They finally break away. Holly’s breathing embarrassingly hard, but Laura’s still wrapped around her, so Holly can feel how fast her pulse is pattering in every place they touch. Laura leans forward to rest her forehead against Holly’s. They’re leaning together against the coke machine, and Laura smiles. From this close, Holly can see the tiny dimple in her cheek and the freckles on her nose underneath a layer of hastily-applied makeup.  
“I’ve wanted to do that forever,” Laura says. It sounds like half reverence, half complaint.  
Holly grins. “Forever? That’s a long time.”  
“Well, you sure took a long time to catch on.”  
“Wasn’t that long. Wasn’t seven years.”  
When Laura laughs, it’s too quiet to hear, but Holly feels the rush of air across her lips. “Felt like it. Look, I’ve smudged you again. Right there.”  
She presses a finger to the edge of Holly’s mouth, then presses her lips there to demonstrate.  
“You’re not fixing it,” Holly murmurs, already chasing another kiss.  
“Tough luck.”  
When Holly goes back to Director Skinner’s office, she has to stop by the women’s restroom. In the mirror, she sees her own lips, sloppily ringed in red. There’s a spot on her neck like a marker. _Laura was here_. She blushes down to the tips of her toes and regrets having to wipe her mouth.

She runs into Scully in the empty break room. It’s a strange place for Scully to be, but then she sees Mulder tagging along behind her, puppy-like. He tracks her every movement with his eyes. They’ve become very, very obvious.  
“Hi, Agent Scully,” Holly says cheerfully. Scully’s proof of a love life no longer weighs so heavily on her. The proof of her own sits upstairs restlessly filing Kersh’s paperwork and waiting for 1 PM. Holly fears for the thoroughness of the paperwork, but she also fears for the life of anyone who criticizes Laura’s paperwork.  
“Hi, Holly,” Scully says warily. They look at each other. Mulder shifts from foot to foot in the background as Scully clears her throat. “Um, about. What you saw the other day.”  
Scully looks deeply embarrassed.  
Holly takes pity on her. “It was pretty dark in the corridor. I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”  
“Well,” Scully says. “Regarding what you couldn’t see because it was…too dark. It was unprofessional. It’s not something that…normally happens.”  
The look Mulder directs at his partner suggests that not only does it happen regularly, but it will continue to happen in the future.  
“Okay,” Holly says. And, in a moment of extreme bravery, she adds, “Don’t tell the betting pool that.”  
“Betting pool?” Mulder and Scully say the same words in two very distinct tones. They glance at each other in alarm.  
Holly holds up her hands. “I don’t really get involved with all that. I wouldn’t know the specifics.”  
Mulder breathes out through his mouth; Scully’s shock is quickly turning to irritation.  
“Hey, Holly?”  
Holly turns around to find Laura standing in the doorway, smiling at her. She’s leaning against the doorframe very confidently in her tight black skirt and heels. Every ounce of that confidence is justified by the warmth that spreads in the pit of Holly’s stomach.  
“Oh hi, love.” Holly’s been practicing in the mirror._Hi love, hi love_. She still sounds like a goof saying it; she’s just not tall enough and pretty enough to deliver it all cool and casual the way she wants. But Laura’s face goes through a complicated maneuver that ends with pink cheeks and a grin, which was the main goal anyway.  
“Came to see you,” Laura says. “I got my lunch early.”  
“Oh, I’ll take mine now. I’m sorry,” she says to Mulder and Scully. “I have to go. Was there anything else?”  
Scully glances at Mulder again. “No, I don’t think so. Thank you for your time.”  
“Betting pool,” Mulder mumbles under his breath.  
Holly turns away, walks up to Laura, and brushes her fingers against her arm on her way through the door.  
“Have a good day, Agent Scully,” she says as she leaves. From the corner of her eyes, she sees Mulder and Scully stepping up close together to trade thoughts again, hiding their secrets from the world. Well, the outside world. Maybe not the office.  
Secrets have a way of revealing themselves around here.

**Author's Note:**

> Did you know that if you listen to Walking After You by the Foo Fighters three times in a row, you can unlock some soft emotions you didn't know you had?


End file.
